Womanist Forefathers: Frederick Douglass and W. E. B Du Bois (review)

Womanist Forefathers: Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois by Gary L. Lemons is designed as an historical study. In the book’s prologue, Lemons addresses the reason he is using the term pro-womanist and not feminist: “to imply an ideological affirmation of feminist principles . . . [and to] strategically play within the humanist domain of womanism” (xiv). Lemons reads the texts and speeches of Douglass and Du Bois in order to find within them the seeds of a pro-womanist impulse in the black male community in America. Both of these figures engaged in explicitly pro-women’s rights work. Douglass was involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Du Bois believed that if women, both black and white, were seen as equal citizens entitled to basic civil and political rights, it would be beneficial to the civil rights movement of the black race as well.

Lemons organizes his book into two parts, the first grappling with the historical material and the second relating this historical study to the present moment. Each section is broken into chapters which are then further divided into subsections, each meant to study some unique incident or to analyze a specific work. Lemons includes both a prologue, used to set out his argument, and an introduction, to further outline his larger project with this book. His argument is that “the retrieval of a pro-woman(ist) black male past represents a form of radical anti-patriarchal insurgency that goes beyond the boundaries of the black cultural nationalism formulated in exclusive antiracist principle” (4). Lemons is interested in studying how appropriating historical black male figures as pro-womanist will suggest strong precedent for contemporary men to be pro-womanist as well.

The chapters are organized chronologically in Part I. This first section of the book does a fine job of pointing to the major contributions to literature and activism of both Douglass and Du Bois. The first chapter, entitled “A Recovered Past Most Usable: Documenting the History of Black Male Gender Progressivism,” is designed to bring the reader up to the time of Frederick Douglass, setting out an historical trajectory, however briefly, of womanist thought in the African American male community until Douglass’s time. “Frederick Douglass’s Journey from Slavery to Womanist Manhood: Liberating the Black Male Self,” the book’s second chapter, slows this historical timeline down, taking time to analyze Douglass’s work in detail, particularly his contributions to the women’s suffrage movement. Lemons uses this chapter to do a close reading of Douglass’s autobiographical writing as well as Douglass’s speech “The Women’s Suffrage Movement.” History then jumps forward in time, with chapters 3 and 4 dealing exclusively with W. E. B. Du Bois and his extensive array of written works. The analysis here is focused primarily on Du Bois’s written texts, such as The Souls of Black Folk and the novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Lemons goes to great length to pinpoint moments in these texts where Du Bois is suggesting a womanist standpoint. Very little information is introduced from the period between these two figures.

Part II then takes another leap forward in history, introducing modern day issues in chapter 5, “On the Power of Contemporary Black Feminist Profession.” For the remainder of the book’s eight chapters, the reader never leaves the contemporary moment. “’Brother’hood Called Into Question,” the book’s sixth chapter, introduces the reader to the various autobiographical works that African American men have written about their womanist and/or feminist lifestyles and ideologies. Chapters 7 and 8 continue this study of autobiography, yet rely more on an outline of particular instances within Lemons’s own personal history than on a cross-section of a larger community’s body of works. The epilogue ties the work up with an analysis of Barack Obama as the apotheosis of an African American man in power committed to this black womanist project.

Lemons’s initial project is...